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Marches of the Federal armies
Fenwick Y. Hedley, Brevet Captain, United States Volunteers, and Adjutant, Thirty-second Illinois Infantry
It was said of
Napoleon that he ‘overran
Europe with the bivouac.’
It was the bivouac that sapped the spirit and snapped the sinews of the
Confederacy.
No other war in history presents marches marked with such unique and romantic experiences as those of the
Federal armies in the
Civil War.
It is worth while to note one march which has received little attention from annalists—one of much importance at the moment, in the meaning it gave to the word ‘discipline,’ and, also, in the direction it gave to the fortunes of the man who was destined to direct all the armies of the
Union.
Early in the opening war-year, 1861, an embryo
Illinois regiment was on the verge of dissolution.
It was made up of as good flesh and blood and spirit as ever followed the drum.
But the colonel was a politician without military training, and under him the men refused to serve.
There was no red tape to cut, for there had been no muster — in for service.
So the rejected colonel was sent his way, and a plain, modest man,
Ulysses S. Grant by name, was put in his place.
Colonel Grant was ordered to
Missouri.
He declined railroad transportation.
Said he, ‘I thought it would be good preparation for the troops to march there.’
He marched his men from Camp Yates, at
Springfield, to
Quincy, on the
Mississippi River, about one hundred miles, expecting to go as much further, when an emergency order from the War Department required him to take cars and hasten to another field.
So early in the war, such a march was phenomenal.
It was
